I know these are alternatives, but I cannot produce a good comparison without usage experiences. In its current form the answer is biased, but I made it as a CW so whoever knows better, can add/correct the list.
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koiyuApr 6 '11 at 12:20

Just pick homebrew and forget about the others.
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sorinJan 8 '13 at 13:17

Can you provide more information regarding your experience, and why this should be better than MacPorts?
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sorinApr 6 '11 at 8:15

3

@Sorin There's some good points in tech.nopho.be/mac-software/… I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew after the first long compile (which hasn't been so much of a problem since), so I really can't provide truthful comparison, but I share all the views pointed in the blog post. There's no sudoing with brew.
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koiyuApr 6 '11 at 9:51

Sorry, but my impression is that brew does compile each package on my machine and this is exactly what I was trying not to do.
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sorinApr 6 '11 at 11:26

1

@Sorin Homebrew uses binaries whenever available, hence many installs are reasonable in length. Also installing and compiling mkvtoolnix (which doesn't have OSX binaries) was noticeably faster (in human and in CPU time) with brew than with ports (this is the only comparison I can provide, and YMMV with other programs).
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koiyuApr 6 '11 at 11:45

Thanks, but I dropped using MacPorts and Fink long time ago. Both projects where not agile enough to add support for new OS X versions. Brew was able, and it keeps being this way.
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sorinJul 2 '12 at 9:10

Sorry, I cannot update the comment: they were not able to add support IN TIME. Brew had support on the day Apple released it and I got support even while the Lion or ML was in developer preview.
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sorinJul 2 '12 at 9:18